Got chills? A few home heating fixes – simple things like closing the damper on a fireplace – can mean big savings. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

Here are some fun facts to contemplate as colder weather looms this week (forecasts are always a moving target, but some call for a possible rain/snow mix in the wee hours this Friday for Colorado’s Front Range).

There’s Cody. There’s the pair of saucy mutts, Lucy and K.D. (the initials stand for King Dog.) There was Milan the husky, and now that Milan has passed, there’s Enzo. Lucky the Border Collie. Lucy the labrador. Buddy the Australian terrier, and the spaniel sisters, Mia and Meg. And now Luna, the rescued Airedale. And, of course, their humans.

We’re a tribe, we morning dog walkers on the westernmost stretch of the Boyd Lake Recreation Trail in Loveland. Cyclists and joggers often pass too quickly for greetings, but dog people come to know one another’s faces and the dogs’ names, which are often exchanged long before human introductions.

Sterling Ranch is the housing development in Douglas County that incorporated water conservation into its planning process, with the botanic gardens’ help. It was also selected as the state’s first rainwater harvesting project.

But the forum won’t be one of those canned presentations with four Powerpoints and the audience “fading out” by the last 15 minutes, said the gardens CEO Brian Vogt. “We want a casual conversation with the panelists free to engage one another. It’ll be much more of a dialogue.” Vogt will throw the panelists some questions, and they’ll take it from there, with, it’s hoped, some time for questions from attendees.

“We want to get and more predictable handle on the availability of water for the next 20 years,” he said. “Clearly we’ll have less, but how much less? How it will affect each ecosystem is different. I’m excited about getting real-life climate scientists to talk about that.”

While the public appetite for new water projects is very small, Vogt said, demand for water keeps growing, he added. If more people understand the big picture about water needs and the future, “we’d make better choices.”

The forum is 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, July 31, at the Botanic Gardens’ Mitchell Hall, 1007 York St. in Denver. RSVP to pr@botanicgardens.org

A garden is never as quiet as when winter returns to give us a stern backward glance.

As of Tuesday evening, I’m not ready to call this storm a total fizzle, though as I write this, Loveland has a paltry few inches compared to reports of nine in Boulder. I definitely wanted a big, sloppy, wet, tree-feeding, bulb-perking, bird-wallow-inducing upslop. I was ready.

When the buzz on Facebook last Sunday wasn’t about the Oscars, it was about the beautiful snow Colorado was finally getting after a lot of false starts, overoptimistic forecasts and drought-and-wildfire worrying.

Mainly, people were thankful. Thankful it happened on a weekend, thankful it was wet and sloppy, thankful it had come before leaves and peach blossoms. I was so happy to have something to shovel – a whole foot of sloppy wet stuff – that the euphoria carried me through clearing my walkway, half the driveway, and most of the sidewalk (a neighbor with a snowblower thankfully took that chore away when I was halfway through.) Read more…

Comments Off on Finally! Snowflakes, snow chores, snow play and snow days come to Colorado

Tennessee purple coneflower, one of the new Plant Select plants for Western gardens (Mike Kintgen, provided by Plant Select)

If you felt a ripple in the gardening force last week, you were right in tune with Denver and the rest of the Western landscape universe: ProGreen Expo was happening, and the combined botanical knowledge packed into the Colorado Convention Center could have warped the orbit of a small planet. Or just the mindset of a Colorado gardener.

Here’s just a sampling of what I found out at ProGreen. The green industry – and here I’m talking plants, not medicinal marijuana or solar panels – is responding to the Front Range’s warming climate, smaller lot sizes and continued drought conditions. These three snippets prove it.

You never know when the magic of the season is going to reach out and grab you, or when you’ll stumble right into it.

My neighborhood up north is still small-town friendly, even though the “town” has gotten much bigger in the 13 years I’ve lived there. But I still have a gaggle of bike-trail buddies, folks who walk their dogs along the Big Thompson River daily. We may not know one another’s names, but we still stop and greet one another while our dogs sniff and wag and mooch treats from the humans. When I bumped into Jo Kibler and her big lab-husky mix Kodi, Jo was carrying an armload of river grass and some dried stalks of mullein. “It’s for our Christmas tree,” she explained. “We always just make one out of whatever we find.”

But if a trip to the forest with a saw just isn’t your party, your choices are down to real and artificial.

So we grilled Doug Berard, the garden buyer for Home Depot who’s in charge of selecting merchandise for its Colorado stores. He answered a few questions for the Colorado at Home blog from his perch in Seattle.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.